


It Is What It Is (The Lying Detective)

by PlaidAdder



Series: Sherlock Meta [11]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Episode: s04e02 The Lying Detective, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-04
Updated: 2017-03-04
Packaged: 2018-09-28 08:31:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10081520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: "A Study In Pink” promised me John Watson’s lesbian sister. It promised a lot of things to a lot of its queer viewers. “The Lying Detective” gave us…something else. It wasn’t what I was hoping for. But it is what it is.





	

I just watched this. I haven’t seen anyone else’s reactions to it. These are just my first impressions, and I will also do the pedantic Canon Reference Game run-down. You want a coherent essay, tune in a couple days from now after I’ve seen it again.

Short story: “A Study In Pink” promised me John Watson’s lesbian sister. It promised a lot of things to a lot of its queer viewers. “The Lying Detective” gave us…something else. It wasn’t what I was hoping for. But it is what it is.

I’ll admit it: this one got me. I was pretty much one step ahead of the twisty turniness until John’s final session with the therapist. And I will admit, even, that the Final Twist was actually more or less following the rules of fair play. We had enough evidence to predict it. We’ve been expecting to hear from “the other one” since “His Last Vow.” In the show’s very first episode, Sherlock assumes that Watson’s only sibling is a brother when in fact it’s a sister, so we were set up for that D’OH!! a LONG time ago. And, I must confess, all of the characters played by Euros had strong accents and two of them wore glasses, which if you are an ACD canon devotee you should know to be suspicious of because they are good ways to conceal your identity from someone who has already met you.

In my defense, I did think, during that first session: Hm. They’ve given John a new therapist. I wonder if they are using her to introduce a new character. But by the time I made it to the other end of that crazy-ass 90 minutes I’d forgotten all about that thought. Also, I was right about the bus lady not being what she seemed. Well, go me.

So, we’ve been talking and talking about how “Dying Detective” might get reworked in this episode. I had hoped for something less…I don’t know…pedestrian. I thought the whole “one word” thing was going to turn out to be “EVERYONE” instead of “anyone” and that Smith would be releasing some kind of pandemic or airborne toxin that would be a threat to life on earth. But no. Another serial killer. Just like Jeff the cabbie. I was tired of serial killers then and I’m tired of them now. One of the things that makes the canonical Culverton Smith interesting is that he is an amateur cultivator of toxic microbes; he’s basically set up his own biological warfare lab and was using it to assassinate people. He’s created a nifty little delivery device in the shape of an ivory box with a spring inside that pops out at you when you open it and stabs you. I do miss all that. I mean there is a lot of stabbing in this (I suppose all the needles are standing in for the sharpened spring), and I suppose they would say that their reboot of Smith’s microbial pursuits is Culverton Smith’s weaponization of the hospital. Which, OK, is creepy. But at the end of the day, the _Sherlock_ Culverton Smith is just another serial killer. Who I really thought at one point was going to be going after the Queen next, but I guess that was a red herring, just like “Sherrinford.”

The other story which is perhaps more important to this episode but which is a lot less famous is “The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger.” This is a late story and it’s not great; Holmes doesn’t really do much detecting and it’s mainly a narrative related by the eponymous veiled lodger, who is veiled in part because a lion ate a lot of her face a while back when her plan to murder her husband went awry. The Veiled Lodger, Eugenia Rounder, describes herself to Holmes and Watson as “a poor, wounded beast that has crawled into its hole to die,” which is basically what both Sherlock and John are at this point in the narrative. “Veiled Lodger” is not that important plotwise, but it is kind of a keynote for Sherlock’s side of the emotional arc: Sherlock’s line, “your life is not your own, keep your hands off it,” which he says first to “Faith” and then to himself (oh my God, she’s named Faith…OK, Plaidder, let’s not go down that rabbit hole) is lifted directly from Holmes’s final interaction with Eugenia Rounder: 

**“Your life is not your own,” he said. “Keep your hands off it.”  
**

**“What use is it to anyone?”  
**

**“How can you tell? The example of patient suffering is in itself the most precious of all lessons to an impatient world.”  
**

**The woman’s answer was a terrible one. She raised her veil and stepped forward into the light.**

**“I wonder if you would bear it,” she said.**

The woman later sends Holmes a package containing her vial of prussic acid and promising to “follow your advice.” 

So this is interesting for many reasons. One, “The Veiled Lodger” is unusual in that it shows Holmes saving someone not by solving their problem, but by responding to human pain with human compassion. It’s true that it is couched in this hortatory spirituality–we can link up this exchange with the bizarre moment in “Naval Treaty” when Holmes starts explaining how flowers prove the existence of God–which is annoying when you look back on it, as is Doyle’s assumption that a woman whose face is disfigured has little else to live for besides setting the “example of patient suffering.” But the fact that Sherlock rousts himself out of his own private drug den solely for the purpose of trying to talk “Faith” out of killing herself is a growth moment for him; it requires him to acknowledge that he cares about the client, for her own sake, as a human being and not just as a puzzle. He also draws some strength from this contact with a soul as lost to despair as he is (and who, like him, has been betrayed pretty foully by the person closest to her). That little scene by the bridge was quite moving, really. After TST I was complaining to my near and dear that I couldn’t get emotionally connected to the characters any more after TEH and HLV; but this episode did get me, at moments like this. Which of course DOES make it ANNOYING that Moffat had to evacuate that–TWICE–before the episode was over.

I found that Ghost Mary didn’t bother me. In fact I like John’s Introject Mary better than I like the real Mary and that’s probably because John’s Introject Mary is not someone who would deliberately SHOOT HIS BEST FRIEND IN THE CHEST. All right, that aside: John’s speech at the end about trying to be the person that the person who loves you believes that you are is a true thing and it is important. I’m better than I would otherwise be because I want to be the person Mrs. Plaidder believes that I am. Introject Mary is, conversely, the person John always wanted her to be: loving, supportive, clever, devoted to him, basically his guardian angel, and also a) a female version of Sherlock (oh, in so many ways) and b) someone really COMMITTED to helping him maintain his relationship with Sherlock. I believe in John’s love for Introject Mary. I kind of love Introject Mary too. I guess it says something about me, Mary, and/or Moffat that I can tolerate her better when everyone’s admitting that she’s a man’s fantasy. Grief is grief, and I have written a lot about John’s grieving (for Sherlock but still), and I guess I connected better emotionally with this episode than with TST because I can actually recognize the Watson I know and love in that part of the story line.

The John Watson who beats Sherlock up until he requires hospitalization? Not so much.

I’ll say one thing for that scene: it’s cured me of wanting a Johnlock endgame. If this is how John Watson is going to work through all of their major relationship problems, then they should not be together. Go be with Irene Adler, Sherlock, you’re safer with her even though she is a master criminal who drugged you and went after you with a riding crop. And then maybe John will wind up with Euros. It’s a traditional Victorian way of triangulating a homoerotic relationship, and she’s probably batshit crazy and violent enough to keep John Watson interested.

But wait. Before we devolve into the shitty parts of this episode, let me appreciate it for what it does for Mrs. Hudson. ACD canon Mrs. Hudson plays a larger role in “Dying Detective” than she does in most of the earlier stories, so it is appropriate to give her a little development here; and that part is really fun to watch, especially the Aston Martin and Sherlock in the trunk (all right, all right: BOOT). And it’s nice to see Molly, if only briefly. And Greg, hello, how are you, I do appreciate your little bits even if they’re not anything much, I’m gonna miss you when this is all over. 

OK. Into the cistern we go.

1) The plot is bananas. I’m not going to belabor it, but let me just note that it BEGINS by asking us to accept that Smith’s daughter and closest associates would just allow the Nurses from Hell to hook them up to Retcon drips while he makes his confession. Fear of needles ALONE would prompt at least one of those people to get up and nope the fuck out. Moffat loves this consenting memory-wipe stuff–he’s used it many times on _Doctor Who_ –and yeah, I know we’re in a heightened universe but. That is not even the craziest thing we have to accept in this episode. We have to accept, for instance, that even though Euros appears to be more or less in the same age range as Mycroft and Sherlock, Sherlock has interacted with her in TWO different disguises and never recognized her. Now, maybe in the next episode we’ll find out that Sherlock never knew Euros or doesn’t remember her for some reason; and of course he’s high; but his being high doesn’t stop him from deducing other things, so why would it stop him from realizing that John’s therapist is virtually identical, physically, to “Faith”? But all right, it’s season 4, I know that bananas plots are the price of admission, let’s move on.

2) We finally get the explanation for the “go to hell” line and, I will admit, I was completely wrong about that. But. “Sherlock deliberately fucks himself up so that John can save him”…I mean that’s a fanfic plot. I bet you can go out there on the Interwebs right now and find over a hundred fanfics based on this exact scenario. Which, you know, fine, it’s a classic for a reason: saving each other is foundational to the Holmes/Watson dynamic and each of them, in his own way, is always climbing out of his personal wounded-animal hole for the other one, all the time. But. If you are going to use this fanfic plot…MUST you use it to forcibly load Sherlock Holmes on the fast track to heterosexual town?

Finally, finally, FINALLY at the end of this episode John and Sherlock have a real conversation and they FINALLY connect, emotionally and physically. But my GOD do they go to a lot of trouble to de-queer that moment. Not only is all this happening only through the intercession of John’s now-saintly departed wife, but we have to watch John physically beat and kick the living shit out of Sherlock before they’re allowed to touch in any other way. And before we get there, we ALSO have to watch John share with Sherlock the hard-won lessons of his own grief, which is: marry a woman and settle down with her, even if she’s a super-weird woman, you’ll still be a complete human being–yes, John literally says that a heterosexual romance will COMPLETE Sherlock as a human being–and have a nice house in the suburbs and you’ll love it.

The fact that any hope for a queer resolution to this three-sided romance has to be drawn from Mary’s final disappearance from John’s imaginary after he and Sherlock are close again doesn’t make me feel a whole lot better.

And finally: 

3) Eurus. 

No.

Just…no.

At the eleventh hour, you bring in this out-of-nowhere third Holmes sibling and I know, I just KNOW, you are going to use her to do the mother of all rug-pulls in the final episode and you know what it’s your show and you can do that but I DO NOT HAVE TO LIKE IT. So this was the reason you created Harry in the first place. It was all just a setup for the Euros Twist. You cared about Harry EVEN LESS than I thought you did! How is that even POSSIBLE?

You know, for a few good moments there I honestly thought the therapist was going to pull off her wig and become Moriarty. I’m not sure I wouldn’t have liked that better. At least I know Moriarty from canon. 

I guess the bright side is that Mary will no longer bother me as much as she used to. Because whatever happens with Euros, it’s gonna get both of these guys into a lot more trouble than they are already.


End file.
